An important milestone meeting on digital identifiers was held earlier this week in the Tower Hill area of London by the Knowledge Exchange, an international information science strategy group representing the UK, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands. There were also representatives present from a number of other countries including Australia, Italy, Norway, the United States, from the international publisher Elsevier and from the ORCID initiative. The meeting at the former Royal Mint, convened by the JISC on 13-14 March 2010, focussed on Digital Author Identifiers and was primarily concerned with uniquely identifying researchers and other academic staff in a cost-effective, internationally agreed and scalable way that has not hitherto been achieved.